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much.
‘I’ll see you,’ he said softly.
The cadences in his voice, his smiling glances, flow through her night thoughts. As she walked away from him – to Scaddan’s for mutton chops and suet, to McCarthy’s for greens – a euphoria such as she had never experienced before made her almost want to cry. And it did not diminish while she peeled potatoes at the sink and blended ground rice with milk, while she beat up an egg and chopped the greens. From across the hall came her great-grandmother’soccasional grunt of impatience or a call for assistance when her jigsaw pieces clattered to the floor, the bedroom door open, as it always was during the day in case of an emergency. ‘How’s she been?’ Her father’s first utterance was the same as ever it was when he entered the kitchen at a quarter past five, but that evening the repetition had an airy freshness about it. Nor was it an irritation when his lowered voice – still loud enough to cross the hall – regaled his grandmother with the details of his day: how he had raked up the last of the grass cuttings and layered them into his compost stack, how Sister Antony Ixida had been on about tayberries again. ‘Who are you anyway?’ came the old woman’s familiar cry. ‘What do you want with me?’
Not wishing to think about the old woman, Felicia is not entirely successful when she tries to divert her thoughts. She remembers how – that lovely, different Monday evening – she in error set a place at the table for Aidan, forgetting that his home was in McGrattan Street now, in the flat about his in-laws’ bicycle and pram shop. At six her two other brothers came in from the quarries, as similar in their reticence as in their appearance, sitting down immediately at the kitchen table to await their food. ‘Yes, she’s struggling on,’ her father reported, returning from his visit to the bedroom and bringing with him an aura of the old woman. Her presence rekindled a spirit in him, her history had long been rooted in his sensibilities: that seventy-five years ago her husband of a month, with two companions, had died for Ireland’s freedom was a fact that was revered, through his insistence, in the household. The tragedy had left her destitute, with a child expected; had obliged her for the remainder of her active life to earn what she could by scrubbing the floors of offices and private houses. But the hardship was ennobled during all its years by the faith still kept with an ancient cause. Honouring the bloodshed there had been, the old woman outlived the daughter that was born to her, as well as the husband that daughter had married, and the wife of their only son. And when she outlived her own rational thought, Felicia’s father honoured the bloodshed on his own: regularly in the evenings he sat with his scrapbooks of those revolutionary times, three heavy volumes of wallpaper patternbooks that Multilly of the hardware had let him have when their contents went out of date. All her life, for as long as Felicia could remember, she had been shown, among dahlias and roses, dots and stripes, smooth and embossed surfaces, the newspaper clippings, photographs and copies of documents that had been tidily glued into place. At the heart of the statement they made – the anchor of the whole collection, her father had many times repeated to her – was the combined obituary of the three local patriots, which had been kept by his grandmother among her few possessions until she decided it would be more safely preserved in the pages of the scrapbooks. Next in importance came a handwritten copy of Patrick Pearse’s proclamation of a provisional government, dated 24 April 1916, its seven signatories recorded in the same clerkly calligraphy. Columns of newsprint told of the firing of the General Post Office and the events at Boland’s Mills, of Roger Casement’s landing from a German U-boat on Banna Strand, of the shelling of Liberty Hall. The attacks on the Beggars’